


Crowning Glory

by lazulisong



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-27
Updated: 2010-04-27
Packaged: 2017-10-09 05:10:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/83377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazulisong/pseuds/lazulisong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A woman's hair is her crowning glory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crowning Glory

**Author's Note:**

> This is a bit more thinky and feminist than usual, so uhhh yeah. My brain isn't _entirely_ made of crack laden swiss cheese, Zoloft sprinkles and complaints about porno. Also, I really and obviously adore lying about Vulcan culture, just so you're warned.

1.

Spock is not proud of her hair, because pride is an emotion, and vanity is worse, but it is long and straight and shines blue-black-green like the pictures of the ravens she sees in the holos that Mother brings from Earth for her. It is longer than any other girl's at school, kept braided and looped up in the simple, childish verison of the style she will wear as an adult of her clan. It is undeniably _Vulcan_, not like her eyes or her nose or especially her ears or build. Nobody mocks her for her hair.

Sometimes Father brings her hair ornaments, traditional ones of stones and metal. Hair ornaments are part of the wealth she will bring with her when she marries, and on feast days Grandmother comes to put up her hair with all her ornaments in an elegant, logical arrangement to display how valued Spock is within her clan. It hurts Spock's head, and the day afterward, Mother insists she wear her hair loose, even though Spock never complains or shows how much her head aches from the heavy ornaments.

The days Spock wears her hair loose, Father sometimes strokes her hair, a single long touch filled with his rare affection.

2.

Spock's older brother is named Sybok, and he's not a very good Vulcan. He laughs a lot, and it makes the grownups nervous, and that always makes Spock nervous too. When she was very small, she used to hide behind Mother's skirts and look at him. Sometimes Father would pick her up and bring her over to talk to Sybok.

Father and Mother aren't nervous about Sybok, so Spock learns not to be either. It takes a while, but soon she's venturing out from behind Mother to stand next to Sybok, staring up at him. Sybok laughs more when he notices her, but it's a nice sort of laugh. Sometimes he laughs in a way that makes Spock dart back to the safety of Mother -- but Sybok always stops that when he realizes he's scared her.

Spock has many memories of him, but the one she treasures the most is the feast day after she turned seven years old. She wasn't bonded yet, and soon, she knows, she will be past the age to be bonded at all. She doesn't know what she thinks about it yet. She knows that if she was a boy, she would be already bonded. She doesn't like the idea of someone besides Mother and Father and Sybok coming into her head, and yet all the girls in her class have gone through their bonding ceremonies, and wear their hair accordingly. They look at her hair, the plain looped braids, and touch their own high coils of hair.

She's sitting in the garden, waiting for Grandmother to come and do her hair up. She's getting to be a big girl now and her hair is nearly to her waist.

"Spock," says Sybok.

She looks up, and he puts a finger to his mouth in a gesture he learned from Mother, and beckons to her. Spock hesitates, looking at the door, and then gets up and goes to him.

"I'm going to do your hair for the feast," says Sybok, and Spock stares at him, because she knows perfectly well that Grandmother won't let anybody, even Mother, do her hair for a feast day. Mother isn't allowed because she won't put all the ornaments in (she thinks it looks ridiculous to have a child of Spock's age to have hair done up like something called a 'geisha') and prefers simply to put ribbons or brooches on Spock's ordinary hair style. Father won't do it because it wouldn't be proper, and none of the maids would dare go against Grandmother. "I won't let you get in trouble," he promises, and Spock sits down in front of him. Sybok always keeps his promises.

He divides her hair into three sections, following a diagram on a PADD. Spock tries to crane her head to see it, but he clicks his tongue at her and then hands her the PADD so she can look at it. _A pre-Surak maiden of good family_, it reads, and Spock stares at the girl on the screen. Her hair falls loose in the back, with braids looped in front and what looks like real flowers crowning her head and tucked in the ends of the free-hanging braids. Spock has never worn real flowers, and she can't even calculate how much that careless arrangement of blossoms would cost. "Brother --" she begins.

"I have paper flowers, little one, don't be illogical," says Sybok. He hands her a box, and when she opens it, she gasps. The flowers look so alive that she has to touch them with one finger to be sure they aren't. They're even scented.

Grandmother is not pleased, but she only tightens her mouth and looks at Sybok for a minute. The paper flowers are so light against her head that she doesn't get a headache at all.

3.

When Sybok goes to Gol, she and Mother and Grandmother all wear their hair down in single thick braids for one lunar period, as if he really is dead.

4.

Spock is not crying. She is a Vulcan, and Vulcans do not cry. Mother's going to be here soon, and she is going to be emotional so Spock doesn't have to be, but right now Spock is not crying. She's not screaming or throwing things or just plain feeling hot rage coursing through her. How dare they! How dare they! How dare her father not say a word!

There's a pair of scissors on her work table. She can't quite think of why she left them out, but now she crosses over to the table, picks them up and goes to the mirror.

Spock's eighteen years old and still wearing the looped braids of an unbonded female member of the House of Surak. She unpins her hair, combing it out and staring at it.

It falls past her knees, thick and richly black. It's the most Vulcan thing about her. It's the thing her father is most proud of about her.

She twists a great hunk into her fist, pulls it out straight, and begins to cut.

*

Mother doesn't say anything when she comes in and finds Spock surrounded by piles of hair nearly a meter in length. She just stops, looks at Spock's flushed face, and comes to her. She takes the scissors from Spock and pushes her gently down to sit at her dressing table.

Mother works in silence with a comb and the scissors, evening the back of Spock's hair -- which reduces it a further decimeter in length, so it is barely mid-back on Spock -- and trimming Spock's bangs neatly. She puts the scissors aside and pulls Spock to her feet.

Spock's taller than her mother now, which is always strange to her. Still she lets Mother hold her close, as if she was a little girl again.

After a minute Mother pulls away, clears her throat and says, brisk and dry, "Dearest, you are not your hair."

Spock stares at her, because Mother often says illogical things to her and Father, but this is the most illogical statement Spock has heard in her life.

Mother flicks some stray hair off Spock's dress and says, "Why don't we show your father your beautiful new haircut, dearest?"

Spock almost winces.

5.

Afterward, after everything, she goes back to the transporter room. Kirk's in Sickbay, with his doctor friend scanning him and sending updates to her communicator like I WAS NOT PREVIOUSLY AWARE YOU COULD BREAK THREE RIBS IN TEN SEPERATE PLACES EACH or ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, THE SWELLING SHOULD DIE DOWN WITHIN A WEEK. Spock flicks through them as they come in -- and perhaps feels a little remorseful at the photo McCoy sends her of the bruising around Kirk's throat -- but she's mostly just staring at the transporter pad.

Where Mother should have been, and would have been, if Spock hadn't --

"Spock," says her father from behind. She can feel Father's presence coming closer to her, until he's standing just behind her. He says, "It is done now."

She nods, short and tight, but says, "I feel --"

"I know," says Father, his voice deep and soft, like she remembers from when she was just a little girl still carried in his arms.

There's a silence, and then Father lifts his hand and rubs a strand of her hair between his fingers. "Your mother ... wore her hair in a manner similiar to this when we met," he says.

Spock turns and looks at him.

"I always thought it was flattering," says Father.

Fleetingly, desperately, Spock wishes she was human enough to cry.


End file.
